Europe : As the transition to third-generation (3G) wireless communications continues to gather momentum, the world's most advanced mobile phone SIM card was today unveiled by three of the leading global suppliers of communications services, silicon chips and smart card technologies.

Above shows the current 3G card from which the 1 Mega card has been developed.

The brand new 1MB SuperSIM card has been developed for TIM, the leading Italian mobile operator, by Oberthur Card Systems, one of the world's leading providers of smart card based solutions, and STMicroelectronics, one of the world's leading suppliers of silicon chip technology.

An essential component of all mobile phones, the SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) card stores critical subscriber authentication information, and also optional private data such as personal phone directories and messages. In the emerging 3G world, where multimedia content such as MMS, audio or video downloads are widely used, memory capability is an issue that affects either the mobile phone, the mass storage element and most of all the security storage element. Further, because this secure data is stored in the SIM card rather than the mobile phone memory, it can be easily carried if the user moves to a new handset.

Today's SIM cards were designed to store text-based data such as phone numbers or SMSs and do not have the memory capacity to store data such as MMS or photographic images that are increasingly demanded by mobile phone users. In the emerging 3G mobile communications world, SIM cards will need to offer far greater storage capacity and much faster communication between the SIM card and the mobile phone.

The new card, called SIMphonIC 3G MEGA, contains a state-of-the-art silicon chip, called ST22FJ1M, made by ST, which includes ST's proprietary SmartJ™ Java-accelerated 32-bit processor and a huge megabyte of embedded Flash memory (enough to hold hundreds of JPG image files) and embedded Operating System (OS) software developed by Oberthur Card Systems.

"The new 1MB SuperSIM, enables us to add a variety of 3G multimedia proposals to the exciting services already offered by our InteracTIM engine. It represents the latest step of an evolution started some years ago that brought TIM to pass, in less than 30 months, from a 32K card to the newest SIM-Plus 128K recently launched in mid October up to this very first innovative product that will revolutionize the mobile telephone market. This unequalled success has been possible thanks to the strong partnership that TIM has always developed with its Card Manufacturers and Chip Makers and that, based on this innovative product, will soon bring other important innovations related to smart card technologies," said Paolo Paganucci Smart Card Manager of TIM.

"The exceptional performances of the SmartJ™ processor combined with our state-of-the-art OS has allowed us to boost the communication speed between the card and the mobile phone to almost forty times faster than a normal 2G SIM card and four times faster than today's best 3G SIM cards," said Velipekka Kuoppala, 3G product manager, Oberthur Card Systems.

"The SmartJ™ chip, combined with the Oberthur SIMphonIC 3G MEGA Operating System will allow TIM's subscribers to enjoy maximum portability of their mobile content and fully benefit from the new 3G features," said Simone Cavallo, Group Vice-President, Smart Card Telecom Division General Manager, STMicroelectronics.

The communication between the SIM card and the mobile phone's electronic circuit is effected via the ISO7816 protocol. However, within this global standard, chip manufacturers and smart card experts can join forces to develop solutions that offer the optimal trade-off between interoperability (any SIM card should work in any mobile phone) and performance. The enhanced performance of the new SIM card allows TIM customers to take advantage of the much greater memory capacities provided by ST and to benefit from the quicker multimedia management between the card and the most advanced mobile phone that is provided by Oberthur's SIMphonIC platform.

The new SIM card developed by Oberthur Card Systems to TIM in partnership with ST is compatible with both the new 3G networks (UMTS/W-CDMA) and current GSM networks in order to ease migration and enable services such as info-on-demand, mobile banking and access to a wide range of services.